


A Farewell to Arms

by iberiandoctor (Jehane)



Series: No Other Place [3]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men: Dark Phoenix
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Chess, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mutant Rights, Paris (City), Post-X-Men: Dark Phoenix (Movie), X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019), integration vs separation, moody Parisian angst, references to Hemingway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25975960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jehane/pseuds/iberiandoctor
Summary: After the war, Charles retreats to Paris to try to find a measure of peace. He finds something else instead.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr & Pietro Maximoff, Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Jean Grey & Charles Xavier, Pietro Maximoff & Charles Xavier
Series: No Other Place [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/868725
Comments: 4
Kudos: 98





	A Farewell to Arms

**Author's Note:**

> CW for mentions of the Holocaust and suicidal ideation.

Charles left Westchester in the stifling heat of the empty, endless summer: after they’d lost Raven, lost Jean, and everything he’d built.

It wasn’t supposed to be about him. There were so many more critical things to address in the aftermath of the D’Bari war — the renewed calls for mutant controls, the plans for the next school year and the continuation of Jean’s curriculum, Raven’s legacy. The battle to keep their world safe for humans and mutants alike went on, beyond a doubt more important than any one retired headmaster. 

The world turned, even though Raven and Jean were no longer in it.

But as the new fall term intake began to loom on the horizon, Charles knew he couldn’t stay. The most powerful telepath in the world couldn’t afford to have a mental breakdown this close to schoolchildren who trusted him, to faculty members who still believed in his dream. 

These days Charles’s dreams were full of Raven and Jean, alive and then dying in blood and fire. His waking hours were spent in a perpetual twilight, stupefied by mortal wounds and surrounded by the rubble of their hopes for a better world. 

Best to take his leave — a general who had long outlived his usefulness — before he could destroy what little they had left.

Hank and Scott had been too shrouded in their own griefs and responsibilities to protest at Charles’s retirement plans. But Kitty cheerfully helped him open a European banking account and book a first class ticket on Air France, and, a good deal less cheerfully, Peter helped him pack. 

“What’s in Paris?” the school’s Head of Physical Education wanted to know as he zipped around Charles’ suite, cataloging clothes and books and other accumulated flotsam of the past fifty-odd years of Charles’ life into piles which Kitty had labeled _TAKE_ , _KEEP_ , _DONATE_ and _BURN WITH FIRE_.

Charles tried to make an effort. “The International Court of Justice? _Notre-Dame de Paris_? The birthplace of one of the world’s most enduring revolutionary spirits?” 

“You’re not really the freedom fighting sort, Professor,” Erik’s son remarked, blandly. He didn’t mention the absent man who would have been a natural candidate for revolution. He didn’t have to. Erik was never far from any conversation between the two of them.

Over the last nine years of their friendship, Charles had often wondered when he’d look into Peter’s eyes and not see Peter’s father. Now he supposed he might never know.

“For a proper vacation, I still think you should buy a villa in the South of France, like Hemingway did when he wasn’t hanging out in seedy cafés in the Quartier Latin,” Kitty offered, from her perch on Charles’ Chesterfield bookshelf (marked _KEEP_ ). “Maybe you could write a book, too!”

In Paris, Hemingway had penned _The Sun Also Rises_ , his seminal perspective on the resilience of America’s post-war generation. Perhaps Charles, raw from the front-lines of a different war, would find himself imbibing some of the novel’s notorious robustness. 

Then again, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to take lessons from that particular decadent, self-destructive American émigré. 

As Kitty began to offer her insights on Hemingway’s novels, Peter did an almost-cinematic second take of the handful of books in Charles’s _TAKE_ pile, and the even fewer clothes, and looked back at Charles as if he wasn’t fooled at all.

  
  
  
  


When he’d first arrived in Paris in 1921, Hemingway had stayed at the Hotel d'Angleterre on 44 Rue Jacob, where Washington Irving had resided, before moving into a walk-up at Rue du Cardinal-Lemoine. 

Charles wasn’t especially keen to follow in Hemingway’s footsteps, and even less keen to haul himself up the narrow Left Bank staircases that were notoriously lacking in wheelchair accessibility. Instead, he chose the historic Hotel Crillon on the Place de la Concord, the historic venue of the signing of the 1778 treaty of amity between France and the newly founded United States.

When his sojourn under that fabled roof began to feel too self-indulgent, Charles traded his bespoke evening wear for summer casuals and found a first floor apartment in the Marais— in a restored 19th century building with a serviceable elevator along the busy Rue des Rosiers. The street was located near the Place Saint-Paul in the center of Paris’s Jewish community, first populated by immigrants fleeing the last century’s persecutions. Charles settled into its rhythm of synagogues and antique bookstores, kosher delicatessens and rococo perfumeries, a society and culture that was strange and soothingly familiar at once.

Erik hadn’t been fortunate enough to flee to Paris as a boy. Persecution and oppression and the Second World War had defined the man he became — with a warrior’s instinct to strike first, and in overwhelming force, with an émigré’s reluctance to put down roots, with a veteran’s innate distrust of anything save for himself. 

Charles’s love hadn’t been enough to make him stay, nor Charles’s dream. Erik had never believed that Charles had enough strength to protect mutantkind from the world, or that any policy of assimilation would succeed. Walking through these old streets that still bore the scars from the Holocaust, carrying wounds from his own attempt at integration, Charles couldn't help but wonder if Erik had been right after all. With no help from Charles, Erik had managed to give life to his separatist ideals, to build a safe haven for their kind from Genosha’s isolated, rocky soil: an independent community of their own at last. 

Charles knew he ought to feel grateful for what Erik had managed to achieve. Instead, it made him feel ashamed. He’d failed their kind, and had betrayed his darlings, out of a fatal hubris that he had been all too quick to see in Erik, but hadn’t recognized in himself until it had been too late.

  
  
  
  


The first time Charles had been in Paris had been in 1973, with Erik: at the Paris Peace Summit that had marked the end of Vietnam War, as well as — thanks to Erik — the first revelation of mutants to the world.

Charles’s second time, in 1986, had also been with Erik: at Magneto’s war crimes trial before the Special Tribunal of the International Court of Justice. Erik’s and the X-Men’s defense of Paris against HYDRA supervillains had not only led the Special Tribunal to declare a mistrial, it had also paved the way for the founding of Genosha.

With his memories of Erik around him, Charles wheeled himself down the bustling walkways and across the rose-lined gardens that gave the Rue des Rosiers its iconic name, past several thousand minds clamoring in a hundred different languages and accents, and he thought to himself: _I will stay as long as I can be sure of myself._

The rest he left unspoken, even to himself. He would only leave Paris when the dreams become too overwhelming, when he could no longer trust himself around other minds. Only then would he take himself to Antibes, where Hemingway had spent his turbulent summers, and try to leave the rest of the world behind.

That said, Antibes might not be far enough away for that.

Charles spent long days at the Bibliotheque Mazarine, engrossing himself in clandestine philosophical manuscripts selected from the great monasteries of Saint Victor and Saint Sulpice, and volumes rescued from lootings of Jewish libraries during WW2. Neglecting the cheerful messages from America and the perfunctory first draft of his memoirs, he browsed the antiquities for sale at the Rue de Rivoli and braved the crowds at the home of Victor Hugo at the Place des Vosges. One deserted morning, he visited the Panthéon, the resting place of France’s heroes, and imagined a similar burial chamber, in an equivalent temple of the Gods inscribed with the gratitude of nations, for Raven, for Jean. 

Over the dying days of summer, Charles immersed himself in this city of sepulchers and language, egalitarianism and rebellion. In the evenings he would return to the Rue des Rosiers and inhale the scent of roses and rare books, and tell himself this would be the night he no longer dreamed of death and guilt.

  
  
  
  


The change of scenery did eventually herald a change in his dreams. In the Rue des Rosiers Charles finally stopped dreaming about Raven. Her laugh and the cool pattern of her thoughts would be entrenched in his mind until the day he died, but one morning he woke to realise he could no longer remember the color of her eyes, and finally shed the tears he hadn’t cried at her funeral.

The next night, he dreamed a different dream of Jean. Her body was outlined in stars, her hair the white-hot heart of the sun, so radiant and glorious he could hardly look at her. 

“You were never good at letting anything go, or any one,” she murmured, sitting at the edge of his bed, with the simplicity of the child he’d taken in and cared for like his own.

“I was never very good at a lot of things,” he responded. His heart heaved with a ferocious grief that threatened to consume everything in its wake.

“Nonsense, Professor. You were good at all the things that mattered. You were the best father a girl could ever have.”

 _That wasn’t true, not when he had betrayed her trust so badly, and then he’d let her_ die —

He heard a terrible sound of anguish which surely no human throat could have made; realized it had been him that had made it. 

Her fingers brushed the side of his face, a hot solar flare. Very gently: “You know you need to let go, now, of us. To let go of me.”

He felt disregarded tears stream down his face. From guilt and grief, or because her brightness was too much for the naked eye to behold. Maybe it was both. 

His voice was breaking. “Tell me how. Teach me.”

She shrugged, an entirely alien gesture. In her gaze there was the distance of galaxies. “Don’t think I can. I’ve moved beyond this world, beyond the stars you’d recognize. If you could see what I see, Charles, you’d be happy for me… But if you could see it, you wouldn’t be human any longer.”

Charles felt his mind fraying at its edges, the way it had when he’d tried to peer into her mind in Manhattan and couldn’t comprehend the vastness it held. He could do nothing now but to retreat, hesitantly, inevitably — she had gone now where no one could follow, not even him.

He couldn’t follow her, but he could try to be happy for her, as any father of a fledgling goddess who had flown the nest and transcended their world.

“I’ll try,” he said, at last. “I’ll try.”

She rose from the side of his bed and turned to go, outlined against the night. Then she paused and looked back at him. 

“One last thing. There’s someone else you need to hang on to, as tight as you can. You’re good at that, and it’s a good thing too, because he’s still human. Still alive.” 

She smiled again, a smile that reminded him of what she’d looked like when she had been human: laughing, breathing, brightly alive. “Mark my words, Professor. He’s not finished yet.”

In her green eyes, Charles saw something like forgiveness.

When he woke in a flood of sunlight — when he realized what Jean had meant — he broke down and wept until he had no more tears left.

  
  
  
  


If Charles was going to make a good faith effort at taking care of himself, he ought to start with better meals. Breakfasts of double bourbon and Russian cigarettes may have suited young Hemingway’s death wish, but Charles’ more-than-middle-aged body could not take that kind of punishment, mutant genes or no. 

He started breaking his fast in the Marais, and when his perambulations took him all the way down the Rue de Rivoli to the Tuileries, he would occasionally find himself at one of the cafés along the Rue de la Paix. Originally named the Rue Napoléon, its name was changed after the Bourbon Restoration to celebrate the newly-minted peace treaty that marked the end to the first Napoleonic Wars.

That afternoon, he was sitting in the sunshine, sipping his cup of coffee and enjoying the hint of fall in the air, surrounded by the hum of a hundred human minds, when he suddenly realized he wasn’t alone. 

The mercurial, quicksilver thoughts; the intellect like a steel trap. The one mind out of millions which Charles would always know and never fully know.

_Hello, Charles._

The café’s name was _Les Deux Copains_. Even a newly-minted goddess with a particularly wry sense of humor couldn’t have planned this meeting with more irony.

Erik approached the table with his usual dangerous grace; an apex predator weaving his way through the oblivious crowd. He wore dark denim and a close-fitting casual jacket as if he was any other fashionable older Parisian, and not the most powerful mutant left in the world. 

He wasn’t wearing his helmet. His thoughts were as bright as day.

Out loud, he said, “Do you remember the last time we were here?”

Charles said, before he could stop himself, “As if I could forget.” Erik’s projected memories were even more vivid than Charles’s were: the technicolor flashes of the Paris Peace Accord, the airy brightness of the Palais de Justice, the evenings spent in Erik’s simple cell in the Conciergerie: bent over defense briefs, and the hand-made travel chessboard Erik had bought in the Middle East, and the battered first edition of the _Once and Future King_ that they had read together in Haifa. 

Erik dimpled as he slid into the seat opposite Charles. His long, athletic limbs seemed almost too large for the small table, and larger than life. 

“Third time’s the charm. How are you finding this summer?”

Charles’s mouth hurt from his efforts not to smile. He made himself speak curtly. “What are you doing here?”

“Peter told me you’d retired,” Erik said, with a casualness that wouldn’t have fooled anyone, let alone Charles, who didn’t need telepathy to read him like a book. “And so I came to look up an old friend.”

Over the years, Erik had developed robust mental shields. Today, those shields had been lowered in a symbolic gesture; Erik was laying himself open to Charles. 

Charles looked at him warily. He had trusted Erik before, and he’d been shot in the spine for his troubles; it had rather been downhill from there. It wasn’t easy to forget that beach in Cuba, or all those times in Paris, when he’d been there for Erik and Erik had chosen to walk away. 

Erik placed a rectangular box with a well-worn handle on the table’s marble top. Charles recognized the chess set, now with a half decade of extra wear and tear: their old companion of the last nights they’d spent together in Paris.

“Fancy a game?”

Charles ran his hands over the intricate inlay he remembered, feeling the ghost of other caresses, other games, under his fingertips like a palimpsest. 

“Not today, thank you,” he said, but he knew Erik could hear the regret in his voice. 

Erik had never taken no for an answer, and this wasn’t a day to start. He began to assemble the chessboard, one piece at time: first one white pawn, and then a black one. 

“A long time ago,” he remarked, nonchalantly, “you saved my life. And you made me an offer. I’d like to make you one in return.”

Charles looked at the pawns on the cracked, checkered surface of the board. The pieces had endured much since the last time he had played with them; worn and weathered by a different climate and a different war. 

The hands that placed the pawns deftly in their positions were also worn and weathered, from decades of fighting at Charles’s side, and of leading an equivalent number of battles against Charles’s side. Charles knew all too well what those hands felt like when they lashed out in anger, when they touched in love. He watched them now, assembling the pieces of yet another game.

Did Charles have it within him to play on, after all this time?

Jean’s words echoed in his mind: _There’s someone else you need to hang on to, as tight as you can._

“Just one game,” he said, at last. “For old times' sake.”

Erik’s eyes crinkled with gratitude as well as triumph. “I'll go easy on you,” he promised, lightly. 

“You never do,” Charles snorted. Truer words were never spoken; Erik had never given any quarter, on the battlefield or in the bedroom or anywhere in between. 

Erik set up the board in their customary opening configuration with Charles taking the first turn. Charles turned the board so their positions were reversed; he saw the surprise flare in Erik’s face, shortly followed by understanding.

“Charles, this is supposed to be me going easy on you, not the other way around.”

“Hardly,” said Charles, as he summoned a café au lait for Erik and another for himself. “I don’t imagine you’d have much opportunity to practice on the island.”

“It’s true: Genosha has many supply shortages, and among them is a shortage of worthy opponents.” Of course, Erik wasn’t just talking about chess. He made his opening move: the classic King’s Gambit that Charles himself had always been partial to, in more ways than one. 

Erik’s counter was usually King’s Gambit declined, followed by the Nimzowitsch variation. Today, though, Charles chose to accept the gambit: a bolder move, but one which left Black more vulnerable to misstep. 

When they first started playing together, Erik had been the more instinctive, daring player, with Charles playing more judiciously. How the tables had turned over the years; the games becoming both a proxy for their real-world battles, as well as a mutual exploration of an uneasy détente.

Move and countermove, he and Erik had always been evenly matched in this, as in all things. They would always be a mirror to each other: two sides of the same coin, the white pawn and the black. Maybe that was why they had never learned to live with each other, or to let each other go.

Charles looked up from Erik’s response to his King’s Knight’s gambit to see Erik staring at him. In that unguarded moment, a lifetime’s worth of regret was transparent in the eyes of his old love and old enemy.

“You said something about an offer,” Charles found himself saying, giving that an enemy another opening.

“That I did,” Erik said. He tipped his white king to the side; a surprising surrender, in light of the checkmate that loomed in the next twelve to fourteen moves ahead of Black. His eyes were a meaningful glaze of blue. “It’s the same one you offered me ten years ago. You offered me a home, a cause, a chance to make a difference to people who needed me. I'd like to do the same for you. Come with me.”

Erik spread his hands on the table, palms open; he opened his mind to Charles. In his thoughts were the bright shores of Genosha — isolated and independent, populated by insurrectionists that even French revolutionaries might respect, and belonging to no one else — shining under an even fiercer sun than this one. 

This was the only thing Charles had ever wanted from Erik, the one thing Charles had ever asked of Erik. _Come with me,_ he had asked, and Erik had always said no, in the end — after Cuba, after D.C., after Cairo. It had broken Charles’s heart every single time. 

And now ten, twenty, thirty years later, Erik was asking this very same thing of Charles. 

Now the moment was finally here, the emotion Charles felt was an overwhelming anger.

He saw his hands were actually shaking. He pushed himself away from the table, almost knocking over his own king. “It’s too late for that.” 

Six years had passed since Paris, thirty since Cuba, and Charles had finally made his peace with the fact that Erik would never come home.

Erik looked as if Charles had struck him in the face, and Charles managed to wrest hold of the monumental swell of rage. He knew he wasn’t being completely fair. Erik couldn’t help being who he was; Charles might as well rage at the moon as it moved the waves of the sea. 

And could Charles really blame him? Charles, with his own immense hubris and pride, who had known nothing about war and had still tried to lecture a victim of war crimes about peace. Who had thought he could possibly understand a man whose family had been destroyed in the Holocaust and who kept losing everyone he loved. 

Finally, now, Charles had learned something of the same loss, the same pain, the same guilt — and he’d also learned it too late to be of any use. 

Erik looked as if he was going to say something explosive. The hurt, furious conflagration of his thoughts made clear that he had no shortage of options. But what he saw in Charles’s face made him fight it back with great difficulty. They sat in silence for long moments, struggling to control their immediate, ill-considered first instincts to draw their weapons. 

Perhaps that, in itself, was a sign they had learned something about peace after all.

If so, it would seem that Erik had been the one who had taken the lessons to heart, for he was first to recover his composure. He sat back in his chair. The hurt and fury faded from his expression, and left in their wake a sudden exhaustion. 

Charles had always looked at Erik and seen the brilliant young man he had met in Miami and fallen in love with in Haifa. Now he saw every line left by the last thirty-three years in the man’s infuriatingly beautiful face. 

He realized, too, how each line made that face even more infuriating, and even more beautiful.

At length, Erik sighed heavily. "That may be true. And it would be my fault, if so.”

As Charles sucked in an astonished breath, Erik continued, the words grinding out of him through clenched teeth, prised out from beneath long-triggered deadfalls and fortified battlements: “If I’d only come with you the last time you had asked. _Any_ of those times you’d asked. If I’d been by your side when you first confronted Jean…”

Charles felt the wind knocked entirely out of him. For long moments, he couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. If Erik had stayed after Apocalypse had ripped both of them wide open, perhaps things would have been different. Perhaps Raven might be alive, and Jean might still be here. 

If Erik had stayed, and given Charles’s dreams of integration a chance, the lines of the battle and the entire war might have been different — the outcome, the aftermath, the uneasy peace.

Erik wasn’t done, though. Now the floodgates had opened, the deeply-buried sentiments unearthed, his words finally began to flow. 

“I should have had more faith in your strength, in your dream. Even if I didn’t believe in it, I should have believed in _you_. I was too proud, too stubborn… I should have known we’d have been stronger if we’d stayed together.” 

He breathed deeply through his nose, and made the final effort. “I should never have left you.”

The groundswell of emotion filled Charles from the toes he didn’t feel any more to the top of his bare head; he felt his heart crack with the magnitude of it. Erik’s eyes were filled with something that wasn’t checkmate, or surrender, but that was more than both those things — a future; a way forward to lasting peace. 

Erik’s throat seemed to have closed, as well; he put his hand over his mouth as he struggled with a different kind of emotion. His thoughts, though, had never been fiercer, or more brilliant: brighter than the late Parisian afternoon that surrounded them both. 

_We can still have that. It’s not too late. Come with me, Charles. Come home._

Jean had been talking about Charles, of course, but her words were equally applicable to Erik. _Hold on to him. You’re good at that, and it’s a good thing too, because he’s still alive._

The way to Genosha wouldn’t be easy, and Charles didn’t know where that path would lead. Didn’t know if he could rebuild his life, if he and Erik could rebuild their love, if they could make peace with each other, and with the world, humans as well as mutants together.

Still, Charles supposed he owed it to his old enemy and his old friend to make the attempt, in the same way as he owed it to himself.

It was easy to fight and fall in battle; much harder afterwards to decide to live. Charles knew that, had used that knowledge to persuade Erik to survive after Cairo, even if it hadn’t been enough to make him stay. 

Now it was Erik’s turn.

_He’s not finished yet._

“All right,” said Charles: to Jean, to Raven, to Erik. “I’ll come with you. I’ll try.”

It was the most anyone could promise. There would always be enemies to fight and countries to conquer, and nobody could truly know what was in Erik Lehnsherr's heart, not even the most powerful telepath in the world. But perhaps after thirty-three years, they finally might discover a way to lay down their weapons, and find a way to a lasting peace in each other’s arms.

“So will I,” Erik promised. He took Charles’s hands and kissed him, as the sun set over this city of heroes and revolution, and rose over an island which might represent their last, best hope for peace.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Prinz and Kai for the beta and the sensitivity consult! Title taken from Hemingway’s famous novel about his WW1 experiences in Italy.
> 
> A note on X-continuity: This post-XDP (2019) story can equally be read as taking place in canon (or some other standalone universe other than [No Other Place](https://archiveofourown.org/series/868725)), i.e. one in which Erik leaves Charles after the events of XMA (2016) and eventually founds Genosha. It does incorporate X-Men Comicsverse’s _Trial of Magneto_ (originally published in Jan 1986) into the ATM movieverse timeline, in the intervening years post XMA (2016)’s 1983 and XDP’s 1992, though, purely so that I can make use of its Paris setting again (I do it for the first time here, in [The Trial of Michael Xavier](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8366890)). 
> 
> Various links: Hemingway’s [Parisian haunts](https://www.beyond.fr/people/hemingway.html), [apartment rentals](https://www.parisattitude.com/rent-apartment/st-paul,apartment,3-bedrooms,1944.aspx) in [the Rue des Rosiers](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_des_Rosiers_\(Paris\)), and [the Mazarine’s eclectic collection](https://www.bibliotheque-mazarine.fr/en/collections/special-collections/clandestine-philosophical-manuscripts)! Plus, [stills from the last scene](https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/x-men-dark-phoenix-reshoot-pic-shows-classic-moment/ar-AAAzUXT?fullscreen=true#image=2) at the (non-existent) café _Les Deux Copains_ on the [Rue de la Paix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_de_la_Paix,_Paris).


End file.
